Remote Possibilities: Urban Experiments and Technologies of Capture in Zuni Icosahedron’s Studio Theatre and Rimini Protokoll’s Remote Hong Kong

Performance is vital for experimenting with ways of moving across virtual and actual spaces and composing forms of urban engagement that sustain both points of contact and of distance. This paper focuses on two performing arts collectives: Hong Kong-based Zuni Icosahedron and Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll. Zuni is comprised of architects, digital media artists, and collaborators across Asia and Europe. Rimini is a group of author-directors whose research based immersive shows tour internationally and draw on everyday experts, urban spaces, and interactive technologies. Both use technology to generate new spaces of urban encounter and to experiment with methods of transcultural collaboration. While Zuni uses the theatre as a laboratory within which to experiment with urban space and cross-cultural encounters, Rimini theatricalises urban space and brings to the foreground the technologies structuring social life.With Zuni and Rimini as case studies and Rey Chow as my theoretical interlocuter, I will explore the technologies of capture, states of captivity, and experiences of captivation that these theatre-makers orchestrate.

The focus of my paper will be on two recent performances in Hong Kong: The first, Z/Z Twin Lab (10/2018), was a live-streaming telematic performance that linked Hong Kong, where dancers from Taipei and Phenom Penh performed ‘Heavenly Palace’, with Zurich, where Denise Lampert and dancers from Zurich University of the Arts performed ‘The Hidden Formula’. The dances,projected into the other city in the form of virtual avatars, explored the question: ‘Is the stage acage?’ Secondly, I will consider the theatricalization of the city in Rimini’s Remote Hong Kong (08/2018), a walking tour in which participants navigated across physical and virtual environments, directed by the voice of an AI guide. Zuni’s telematic and Rimini’s site-specific experiments demonstrate how spaces of performance can both entrap performers in programmed, atomised gestures, and also enable gestures that are adaptive, indeterminate,and co-relational.